In a piece for the online newsletter Persuasion, Lukianoff makes the case for 10 reforms needed to prepare students for a contentious world. “I think everyone understands that they have a free-speech right, but they don’t necessarily understand why you should have one,” Lukianoff told The New York Times in 2016. The cases change, but the underlying principal doesn’t. Sometimes that places them on the side of conservative groups and sometimes left-leaning causes. They sue to strike down speech codes, to prevent universities from punishing students for political speech, and to protect the academic freedom of professors. That’s because FIRE president Greg Lukianoff stays laser-focused on defending basic constitutional rights for students and teachers across the country. And they end up taking positions that annoy almost everyone involved in the campus culture wars, which seem to be intensifying. The group isn’t partisan, though they’re frequently drawn into conflicts that have a partisan flavor. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) plays a unique role in American education. Think hard about where you want to contribute. Do you know how a car works? How electricity gets into your phone? The math behind cell-tower triangulation allowing your phone to give decent directions while you’re driving that car? You’re already living inside of a group mind, the collective intelligence that makes civilization go. If that sounds like something out of a creepy science-fiction story, consider for a moment all the things in your daily life you don’t understand. Something beyond solo thinking is required-the generation of a state that is entirely natural to us as a species, and yet one that has come to seem quite strange and exotic: the group mind.” In this milieu, a single mind laboring on its own is at a distinct disadvantage in solving problems or generating new ideas. Individual cognition is simply not sufficient to meet the challenges of a world in which information is so abundant, expertise is so specialized, and issues are so complex. “In business and education, in public and private life, we emphasize individual competition over joint cooperation. “Our culture and our institutions tend to fixate on the individual-on his uniqueness, his distinctiveness, his independence from others,” Paul writes. The ability to mind-meld with people around us in pursuit of a common goal is a core human strength, and the study of how individual people turn into a closely linked problem-solving machine is a subject of endless fascination for cognitive psychologists and management consultants alike. In an excerpt published by Wired, Murphy tells the story of an aircraft carrier that suddenly lost power and how the problem required the combined ingenuity of several officers and sailors to set it right. Annie Murphy Paul calls this “socially distributed cognition,” and she argues in her new book The Extended Mind that most of our big problems will get solved not by individual genius but by the pooled intelligence of many different brains working together. Thinking is hard, so we make other people do a lot of it for us.
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